An annual celebration of the social sciences at UC Berkeley
The Social Sciences Fest is an occasion to celebrate the UC Berkeley Division of Social Science. We’re thrilled to gather in person again this year! Join us as we recognize our new faculty members and honor this year’s Distinguished Teaching and Service Award recipients. Please come to reconnect, celebrate each other, learn about what’s new at Social Science Matrix, and participate in the amazing community that is Berkeley Social Science!
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Presented by the Citrin Center for Public Opinion Research, this panel will feature:
This event will be presented in-person at Social Science Matrix, 820 Social Sciences Building. Register to attend.
View MapPart of the celebration of the 100th Anniversary of Berkeley Psychology
As part of our ongoing series of events celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Psychology Department at UC Berkeley, we are delighted to showcase three of our faculty and their research – Professors Robert Knight, Sheri Johnson, and Jason Okonofua. The cutting-edge research of each of these faculty and their students uniquely illustrates how psychological science can contribute to solving a broad range of big problems at both the individual and societal levels. After each faculty presentation, audience members will have the chance to engage the speaker with questions and comments.
Physiology of Human Cognition: Insights from Direct Brain Recording with Implications for Health and Disease
Robert T. Knight, M.D., Distinguished Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience
How do we think, remember, speak, and socialize? Discovering the physiological substrate of these human behaviors presents one of the great scientific challenges of the 21st century. Evidence obtained from electrodes inserted into the human brain for treatment of medication refractory epilepsy provides unprecedented insight into the electrophysiological processes supporting human behavior. I will review some of our findings with implications for understanding brain function in health and how these findings might be used for development of neuroprosthetic devices for treatment of disabling neurological disorders.
Understanding and Managing Impulsivity
Sheri L. Johnson, Ph.D., Distinguished Professor of Psychology
For decades, scientists have considered the role of impulsivity in contributing to mental health and behavioral outcomes. In the last 20 years, researchers have shown that one form of impulsivity—the tendency to engage in rash and regrettable behavior during states of high emotion—is particularly related to poor outcomes. I will review some of the outcomes tied to this form of impulsivity, and I will highlight new treatment development work.
Sidelining Bias: A Situationist Approach to Reduce the Consequences of Bias in Real-World Contexts
Jason A. Okonofua, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Psychology
Bias and bias-reduction have become ubiquitous topics of research, policy, and practice. I will introduce an approach to study and mitigate societal consequences of bias that begins with the presumption that people are inherently complex, that is, including multiple, often contradictory patterns of selves and goals. When we conceptualize the person this way, we can ask when biased selves are likely to emerge and whether we can sideline this bias—alter situations in potent ways that elevate alternative selves and goals that people will endorse and for which bias would be non-functional. My research shows how sidelining bias has led to meaningful improvements for thousands of individuals in real-world outcomes, including higher achievement and reduced school suspensions for youth and recidivism to jail for youth and adults.
Robert T. Knight, M.D.: Dr. Knight is a Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at UC Berkeley. His laboratory studies neurological patients with frontal lobe damage and also records electrical signals directly from the brain of neurosurgical patients to understand the role of human prefrontal cortex in goal-directed behavior and for development of neuroprosthetics devices for disabling neurological disorders. Dr. Knight has twice received the Jacob Javits Award from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke for Distinguished Contributions to Neurological research, the IBM Cognitive Computing Award, the German Humboldt Prize in Neurobiology, the Distinguished Career Contribution Award from the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, the Award for Education in Neuroscience from the Society for Neuroscience and the Howard Crosby Warren Medal from the Society of Experimental Psychologists for Distinguished Career Contributions. Read more.
Dr. Sheri L. Johnson: Dr. Johnson is a distinguished professor of psychology at the University of California Berkeley. Her work has focused on two themes: reward sensitivity and emotion-related impulsivity. Her work has been funded by NARSAD, NIMH, NSF, and NCI. She has published over 275 manuscripts, including publications in leading journals such as the American Psychologist, Psychological Bulletin, Current Directions in Psychological Science, and the American Journal of Psychiatry. She is co-author/co-editor of six books. She is a fellow of the Association for Behavioral Medicine Research, the Association for Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, and the Association for Psychological Science, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (2013-2014), and former president of the Society for Research in Psychopathology. Read more.
Dr. Jason Okonofua: Dr. Jason Okonofua is a professor at the University of California-Berkeley. Jason’s research program examines social-psychological processes that contribute to inequality. One context in which he has examined these processes is that of teacher-student relationships and race disparities in disciplinary action. His research emphasizes the ongoing interplay between processes that originate among teachers (how stereotyping can influence discipline) and students (how apprehension to bias can incite misbehavior) to examine causes for disproportionate discipline according to race. Read more.
Racial capitalism has become a widely used term – but how should we define it and what specific forms does it take? This talk by Catherine Hall will focus on 18th-century Jamaica and the ways in which two separate sets of practices – racisms and capitalism – intersected to form a system embedded in both the metropolitan and the colonial states.
Catherine Hall is Emerita Professor of History and Chair of the Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery at University College London. Her recent work has focused on the relation between Britain and its empire: Civilising Subjects (2002), Macaulay and Son (2012) and Hall et al, Legacies of British Slave-ownership (2014). Between 2009-2015 she was the Principal Investigator on the ESRC/AHRC project “Legacies of British Slave-ownership,” which seeks to put slavery back into British history. Her new book will be Edward Long and Lucky Valley: Racial Capitalism and the History of Jamaica.
This talk is co-sponsored by UC Berkeley Social Science Matrix, Department of Geography, Center for British Studies, Critical Theory Program, Institute for the Study of Societal Issues, and Department of History.
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What can we learn from historical and contemporary cases about building organizations that engage, mobilize and manage to wield influence on the political process? What kinds of infrastructural choices best support engagement and success in the long run? Our panelists will explore the varied and changing terrain of collective action to reflect on the nature, promises and pitfalls of associational power in the 21st century. This event is co-sponsored by the Center on Democracy and Organizing.
Arisha Hatch is the vice president and chief of campaigns at Color Of Change, leading campaigns on civic engagement, voting rights, criminal justice, and corporate and media accountability. Arisha is a leader and innovator in the racial justice movement. She organized Black People’s Brunches, which brought together more than 12,500 civic-minded Black people in 2018 to discuss a host of social justice issues and helped to set the organization’s agenda for 2019 and beyond. Since joining Color Of Change in 2012, she has ushered in groundbreaking victories for Black communities. She championed getting payment processors like Mastercard and PayPal to ban the use of their platforms by white supremacists, persuaded Saturday Night Live to add two Black women to its cast and writer’s room mid-season and successfully led efforts to remove Donald Trump from Facebook and Twitter and R. Kelly from RCA. Before coming to Color Of Change, Arisha worked as a lawyer and organizer for Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign. She later served as the national organizing director of the Courage Campaign, where she helped lead groundwork for progressive change in California. In 2020, Arisha was named one of Essence Magazine’s Woke 100 and The Root’s 100 Most Influential African Americans. Her editorial writing has been published by Essence, The Root, The Grio and TechCrunch, and she is a regular commentator on political and social justice topics for major news outlets. Arisha was born in Texas and raised in Southern California. She has degrees in economics, creative writing and feminist studies from Stanford University, and she received her doctorate in law from Santa Clara University in California.
Liz McKenna is a postdoctoral scholar at the SNF Agora Institute and P3 Lab at Johns Hopkins University. She received her Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California, Berkeley in 2020. Liz studies left and right-wing social movements in the United States and Brazil, using multiple methods to examine when civil society organizations safeguard against authoritarianism, and when they become the primary carriers of it. She is the co-author of Groundbreakers: How Obama’s 2.2. Million Volunteers Transformed Campaigning in America (Oxford University Press, with Hahrie Han) and Prisms of the People: Power and Organizing in 21st Century America (University of Chicago Press, with Hahrie Han and Michelle Oyakawa). Liz received the 2021 American Sociological Association Best Dissertation Award for her dissertation on politics and organizing in contemporary Brazil. Prior to graduate school, she worked as a political and community organizer in Ohio and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
Hahrie Han is the Inaugural Director of the SNF Agora Institute, the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Professor of Political Science, and Faculty Director of the P3 Research Lab at Johns Hopkins University. She specializes in the study of organizing, movements, civic engagement, and democracy. In 2022, she was named a Social Innovation Thought Leader of the Year by the World Economic Forum’s Schwab Foundation. Her latest book was published by the University of Chicago Press in July 2021, entitled Prisms of the People: Power and Organizing in 21st Century America. She has previously published three books: How Organizations Develop Activists; Groundbreakers: How Obama’s 2.2 Million Volunteers Transformed Campaigning in America; and, Moved to Action. Her award-winning work has been published in the American Political Science Review, American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), and numerous other outlets, including the New York Times, Washington Post, and elsewhere. She is currently working on a fifth book, to be published with Knopf (an imprint of Penguin Random House), about faith and race in America, with a particular focus on evangelical megachurches.
Michelle Oyakawa is an assistant professor of sociology at Muskingum University in Ohio. She studies the intersection of race, religion, and social movements through her research on leaders and organizations. She received her PhD in sociology from The Ohio State University in 2017. Her work has been published in academic journals, including Qualitative Sociology, Sociology of Religion, and the Journal of Community Psychology, and she is coauthor of two books about mobilization: Prisms of the People: Power and Organizing in 21st Century America (with Hahrie Han and Liz McKenna; University of Chicago Press, 2021) and Smart Suits, Tattered Boots: Black Ministers and Mobilization in the 21st Century (with Korie Edwards; New York University Press, forthcoming).
Margaret Levi is the Sara Miller McCune Director of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS), Professor of Political Science, and Senior Fellow of the Woods Institute, Stanford University. Levi is the author or coauthor of numerous articles and six books, including Of Rule and Revenue (University of California Press, 1988); Consent, Dissent, and Patriotism (Cambridge University Press, 1997); Analytic Narratives (Princeton University Press, 1998); and Cooperation Without Trust? (Russell Sage, 2005). One of her most recent books, In the Interest of Others (Princeton, 2013), co-authored with John Ahlquist, explores how organizations provoke member willingness to act beyond material interest. In other work, she investigates the conditions under which people come to believe their governments are legitimate and the consequences of those beliefs for compliance, consent, and the rule of law. Her research continues to focus on how to improve the quality of government and how to generate a better political economic framework. She is also committed to understanding and improving supply chains so that the goods we consume are produced in a manner that sustains both the workers and the environment.
Marshall Ganz: As Rita E. Hauser Senior Lecturer in Leadership, Organizing and Civil Society at the Kennedy School of Government, Marshall Ganz teaches, researches, and writes on leadership, narrative, strategy and organization in social movements, civic associations, and politics. He grew up in Bakersfield, California where his father was a Rabbi and his mother, a teacher. He entered Harvard College in the fall of 1960. He left a year before graduating to volunteer with the 1964 Mississippi Summer Project. He found a “calling” as an organizer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and, in the fall of 1965 joined Cesar Chavez in his effort to unionize California farm workers. During 16 years with the United Farm Workers he gained experience in union, political, and community organizing; became Director of Organizing; and was elected to the national executive board on which he served for 8 years. During the 1980s he worked with grassroots groups to develop new organizing programs and designed innovative voter mobilization strategies for local, state, and national electoral campaigns. In 1991, in order to deepen his intellectual understanding of his work, he returned to Harvard College and after a 28-year “leave of absence” completed his undergraduate degree in history and government. He was awarded an MPA by the Kennedy School in 1993 and completed his PhD in sociology in 2000. He has published in the American Journal of Sociology, American Political Science Review, American Prospect, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Stanford Social Innovation Review and elsewhere. His newest book, Why David Sometimes Wins: Leadership, Organization and Strategy in the California Farm Worker Movement was published in 2009, earning the Michael J. Harrington Book Award of the American Political Science Association. In 2007-8 he was instrumental in design of the grassroots organization for the 2008 Obama for President campaign. In 2010 he was awarded an honorary doctorate in divinity by the Episcopal Divinity School. In association with the global Leading Change Network of organizers, researchers and educators he coaches, trains, and advises social, civic, educational, health care, and political groups on organizing, training, and leadership development around the world.
Lisa García Bedolla (moderator) is Vice Provost for Graduate Studies and Dean of the Graduate Division and a Professor in the Graduate School of Education at UC Berkeley. She uses the tools of social science to reveal the causes of political and educational inequalities in the United States. She has published six books and dozens of research articles, earning five national book awards and numerous other awards. She has consulted for presidential campaigns and statewide ballot efforts and has partnered with over a dozen community organizations working to empower low-income communities of color. Through those partnerships, she has developed a set of best practices for engaging and mobilizing voters in these communities, becoming one of the nation’s foremost experts on political engagement within communities of color.
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Cross-disciplinary conversations on today’s most pressing contemporary issues
In the last three weeks, Russia’s political ambitions in Ukraine have escalated into a full-fledged invasion and war. As politicians attempt to negotiate a ceasefire, thousands of soldiers and hundreds of civilians have likely been killed, and more than two million people have fled the country into neighboring Poland, Hungary, Romania, and other countries. The conflict has upended international relations, raised questions about the dependence of the United States and Europe on Russian fossil fuels, and strained infrastructures of refugee assistance and resettlement. How does the war change what we thought we knew about geopolitics, international macroeconomics, the European refugee crisis, and the conduct of modern warfare?
Please join us for this essential Matrix on Point event. This is meant to be an open discussion, kicked off by UC Berkeley experts. This event is co-sponsored by the Institute of International Studies.
This event will be held in person at Social Science Matrix, 820 Social Sciences Building, and will also be streamed live via Zoom.
Yuriy Gorodnichenko, a native of Ukraine, is a Quantedge Presidential professor in the Department of Economics at U.C. Berkeley. A significant part of his research has been about monetary policy (effects, optimal design, inflation targeting), fiscal policy (countercyclical policy, government spending multipliers), taxation (tax evasion, inequality), economic growth (long-run determinants, globalization, innovation, financial frictions), and business cycles. Yuriy serves on many editorial boards, including Journal of Monetary Economics and VoxUkraine. Yuriy is a prolific researcher, with works published in leading economics journals and cited in policy discussions and media. Yuriy has received numerous awards for his research.
Gérard Roland is the E. Morris Cox professor of economics and professor of political science at U.C. Berkeley where he has been since 2001. He has received many honors including an honorary professorship from the Renmin University of China in Beijing in 2002 and the medal “De Scientia et humanitate optime meritis” by the Czech Academy of Sciences in 2018. The Association for Comparative Economic Studies created an annual dissertation fellowship in his name to recognize his contributions to the field. He is the author of over 150 journal articles, chapters in books, and books and has been published in leading economics journals on topics of transition, political economy, culture and comparative economics. He wrote the leading graduate textbook Transition and Economics published in 2000 and translated in various languages, including Chinese and Russian. In recent years, his research has broadened to developing economies in general with special emphasis on the role of institutions and culture.
John Connelly is the Sidney Hellman Ehrman Professor in the Department of History at U.C. Berkeley and the director of the Institute for East European, Eurasian, and Slavic Studies. His scholarship focuses on the history of East and Central Europe, with special concern for problems of religious and ethnic identity in multinational space. He has published Captive University: The Sovietization of East German, Czech and Polish Higher Education, From Enemy to Brother: The Revolution in Catholic Teaching on the Jews, and From Peoples Into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, and is at work on a history of democracy in Europe, 1076 to present.
Katerina Linos is the Irving G. and Eleanor D. Tragen Professor of Law at UC Berkeley, where she also serves as Co-Faculty Director of the Miller Institute for Global Challenges and the Law. Her research interests include international law, comparative law, European Union law, and migration law. To address questions in these fields, her work combines legal analysis with empirical methods. In 2017, Linos was awarded a Carnegie fellowship to study the European refugee crisis. She investigated how communication barriers frustrate fundamental rights, explored the potential of new technologies to facilitate refugee and migrant integration, and developed digital refuge. Linos’ research appears in leading law reviews and peer-reviewed journals, including the American Journal of International Law, the American Journal of Political Science, the American Political Science Review, the California Law Review, and many others.
Daniel J. Sargent (moderator) is Associate Professor at UC Berkeley, where he holds faculty appointments in the Department of History and the Goldman School of Public Policy, and he serves as co-director of the Institute of International Studies. He is the author of A Superpower Transformed: The Remaking of American Foreign Relations in the 1970s (Oxford University Press, 2015) and a co-editor of The Shock of the Global: The 1970s in Perspective (Harvard University Press, 2010). He is writing an interpretive history of the postwar international order, titled Pax Americana: The Rise and Fall of the American World Order.
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Part of the Authors Meet Critics event series
In this September 30 “Author Meets Critics” panel, Carolyn Chen, Associate Professor in the UC Berkeley Department of Ethnic Studies, will present her book, Work Pray Code: When Work Becomes Religion in Silicon Valley. Professor Chen will be joined in conversation by Arlie Hochschild, Professor Emerita in the UC Berkeley Department of Sociology, and Morgan Ames, Assistant Professor of Practice in the UC Berkeley School of Information and Associate Director of Research for the Center for Science, Technology, Medicine and Society.
This hybrid event will be held in person at Social Science Matrix, 820 Social Sciences Building, on the UC Berkeley campus. We will also broadcast the event via Zoom and will send a link to registrants prior to the event.
Co-sponsored by the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion and the Berkeley Haas Culture Initiative.
Silicon Valley is known for its lavish perks, intense work culture, and spiritual gurus. Work Pray Code explores how tech companies are bringing religion into the workplace in ways that are replacing traditional places of worship, blurring the line between work and religion and transforming the very nature of spiritual experience in modern life.
Over the past forty years, highly skilled workers have been devoting more time and energy to their jobs than ever before. They are also leaving churches, synagogues, and temples in droves—but they have not abandoned religion. Carolyn Chen spent more than five years in Silicon Valley, conducting a wealth of in-depth interviews and gaining unprecedented access to the best and brightest of the tech world. The result is a penetrating account of how work now satisfies workers’ needs for belonging, identity, purpose, and transcendence that religion once met. Chen argues that tech firms are offering spiritual care such as Buddhist-inspired mindfulness practices to make their employees more productive, but that our religious traditions, communities, and public sphere are paying the price.
We all want our jobs to be meaningful and fulfilling. Work Pray Code reveals what can happen when work becomes religion, and when the workplace becomes the institution that shapes our souls.
Co-sponsored by the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion (BCSR).
Use the code WPC30 to purchase this book at a 30% discount from the Princeton University Press website.
Carolyn Chen is Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley. She is the author of Getting Saved in America: Taiwanese Immigration and Religious Experience (Princeton 2008) and co-editor of Sustaining Faith Traditions: Religion, Race and Ethnicity among the Latino and Asian American Second Generation (NYU 2012). Her new book, Work Pray Code: When Work Becomes Religion in Silicon Valley, was published by Princeton University Press. Professor Chen received her doctorate in Sociology from UC Berkeley in 2002. Prior to teaching at Berkeley, she was Associate Professor of Sociology and Asian American Studies at Northwestern University, where she served as Director of the Asian American Studies Program. At UC Berkeley, Professor Chen is Co-Director of the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion, a member of the Center for Chinese Studies, and the Religious Diversity Cluster at the Othering and Belonging Institute, and an affiliate in the Department of Sociology.
Arlie R. Hochschild‘s research focuses on the rise of the American right, the topic of her book, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right (The New Press, September 2016), a finalist for the National Book Award. Based on intensive interviews of Tea Party enthusiasts in Louisiana, conducted over five years and focusing on emotions, she tried to scale an “empathy wall” to learn how to see, think and feel as they do. In The Outsourced Self: Intimate Life in Market Times, she explored the shifting boundary between market and intimate life and methods by which individuals manage that boundary to keep personal life feeling personal. In 2013, she wrote So How’s The Family and Other Essays, a sampler of an applied sociology of emotion. It includes essays on emotional labor—when do we enjoy doing it and when not?—empathy, personal strategies for handling life in a time bind, and the global traffic in care workers. Earlier work was based on field work among older residents of a low-income housing project, (The Unexpected Community), flight attendants and bill collectors who perform “emotional labor” (The Managed Heart), working parents struggling to divide housework and childcare (The Second Shift), corporate employees dealing with a corporate culture of workaholism (The Time Bind), and Filipina nannies who’ve left their children behind to care for those of American families (Global Woman). Her work is available in 16 languages.
Morgan Ames is an Assistant Professor of Practice in the School of Information and Associate Director of Research for the Center for Science, Technology, Medicine and Society at UC Berkeley. Morgan researches the ideological origins of inequality in the technology world, with a focus on utopianism, childhood, and learning. Her book The Charisma Machine: The Life, Death, and Legacy of One Laptop per Child (MIT Press, 2019), draws on archival research and ethnographic fieldwork in Paraguay to explore the cultural history, results, and legacy of the OLPC project. The book won the 2020 Best Information Science Book Award, the 2020 Sally Hacker Prize, and the 2021 Computer History Museum Prize. Her next project extends the questions regarding the interaction between computers, ideology, and identity to explore the role that utopianism plays in discourses around childhood, education, and ‘development’ in Silicon Valley and the San Francisco Bay Area.
Marion Fourcade (moderator) is Director of Social Science Matrix and Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley. She specializes in the comparative history and sociology of the social sciences and in the study of classification and valuation processes. Her current work focuses on new forms of stratification, morality and profit in the digital economy.
The Institute of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies at UC Berkeley is convening a panel discussion on recent events in Ukraine, with Professor Steven Fish (Political Science, UC Berkeley), Professor Yuriy Gorodnichenko (Economics, UC Berkeley), and Dr. Edward Walker (ISEEES, UC Berkeley). Each speaker will deliver remarks on the current situation in Ukraine, which will be followed by a moderated Q&A session.
Steven Fish, Professor of Political Science, UC Berkeley; Yuriy Gorodnichenko, Quantedge Presidential Professor of Economics, UC Berkeley; Edward Walker, Research Associate, ISEEES, UC Berkeley
Institute of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ISEEES)
Co-sponsored by the Network for a New Political Economy (N2PE).
How does the shift away from cash economies affect relationships of debt and belonging? Through studying forms of cashless payment, such as mobile money and apps, this panel of scholars will ask questions about how the social connections made through money are changing, and what the implications might be for our understanding of money, trust, and social connection.
Please join us on April 14 for a Matrix panel discussion featuring Jayati Ghosh, Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst; Lana Swartz, Assistant Professor of Media Studies at the University of Virginia; and Kevin Donovan, Lecturer in the Centre of African Studies at the University of Edinburgh.
Jayati Ghosh taught economics at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi for nearly 35 years. She is currently Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, USA. She has authored and/or edited 20 books and more than 200 scholarly articles. Recent books include The making of a catastrophe: Covid-19 and the Indian economy, Aleph Books forthcoming 2022; When governments fail: Covid-19 and the economy, Tulika Books and Columbia University Press 2021 (co-edited); Women workers in the informal economy, Routledge 2021 (edited); Never Done and Poorly Paid: Women’s Work in Globalising India, Women Unlimited, New Delhi 2009; co-edited Elgar Handbook of Alternative Theories of Economic Development, 2014; co-edited After Crisis, Tulika 2009; co-authored Demonetisation Decoded, Routledge 2017; She has published more than 200 scholarly articles. She has received several prizes, including for the 2015 Adisheshaiah Award for distinguished contributions to the social sciences in India; the International Labour Organisation’s Decent Work Research Prize for 2011; the NordSud Prize for Social Sciences 2010, Italy. She has advised governments in India and other countries, including as Chairperson of the Andhra Pradesh Commission on Farmers’ Welfare in 2004, and Member of the National Knowledge Commission of India (2005-09). She was the Executive Secretary of International Development Economics Associates (www.networkideas.org), an international network of heterodox development economists, from 2002 to 2021. She has consulted for international organisations including ILO, UNDP, UNCTAD, UN-DESA, UNRISD and UN Women and is member of several international boards and commissions, including the UN High Level Advisory Board on Economic and Social Affairs, the Commission on Global Economic Transformation of INET, the International Commission for the Reform of International Corporate Taxation (ICRICT). In 2021 she was appointed to the WHO Council on the Economics of Health for All, chaired by Mariana Mazzucato. She writes regularly for popular media like newspapers, journals and blogs.
Lana Swartz is assistant professor of Media Studies at University of Virginia. She is author of New Money: How Payment Became Social Media (Yale 2020) and co-author of Paid: Tales of Dongles, Checks, and Other Money Stuff (MIT 2017). She is currently working on two projects: a collaborative project about the promises and perils of CBDCs, and a book-length project about scams in the digital economy.
Kevin P. Donovan is an anthropologist and historian at the University of Edinburgh. He is currently writing a book on the history of economic decolonization in East Africa, focusing on central banks, the politics of price, and smuggling. In addition, he and Emma Park are working on a book about digital money, intimate infrastructures, and the corporate-state in Kenya. Writing on these topics is available at https://kevinpdonovan.com/.
Co-sponsored by the Clausen Center for International Business and Policy
The emergence of cryptocurrencies and digital payment systems poses a number of fundamental questions to the social sciences. What, after all, is money and who should be allowed to issue it? On the one hand, competition from private digital currencies could spur innovation, improve the efficiency and speed of payments, increase financial inclusion, and at the very least jolt public actors into upgrading an old and creaky payment system. On the other hand, money is a public good and private competition could trigger momentous — and perhaps unwelcome — changes to the economic, social and political infrastructure. Even public options, such as Central Bank Digital Currencies, could profoundly reshape the financial system. Around the world, monetary institutions are watching these developments with anxiety, and calls for a coordinated response are growing.
Join us on March 2, 2022 for a panel discussion on “Cryptography and the Future of Money,” featuring Markus K. Brunnermeier, Edwards S. Sanford Professor in the Economics Department at Princeton University and Director of Princeton’s Bendheim Center for Finance; Stefan Eich, Assistant Professor of Government at Georgetown University; and Christine Parlour, the Sylvan C. Coleman Chair of Finance and Accounting at Berkeley Haas. The panel will be moderated by Barry Eichengreen, the George C. Pardee and Helen N. Pardee Chair and Distinguished Professor of Economics and Professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley.
Co-sponsored by the Clausen Center for International Business and Policy.
This event will be streamed online via Zoom. A link will be sent to registrants prior to the event.
Markus K. Brunnermeier is the Edwards S. Sanford Professor in the economics department at Princeton University and director of Princeton’s Bendheim Center for Finance. His research focuses on international financial markets and the macroeconomy with special emphasis on bubbles, liquidity, financial and monetary price stability, and digital money. His recent book, The Resilient Society, won the Prize for the 2021 best business book in German and was listed among best economics books by the Financial Times.
Stefan Eich is an Assistant Professor of Government at Georgetown University. His research is in political theory, intellectual history, and the history of political thought, especially the political theory of money. He is the author of The Currency of Politics: The Political Theory of Money from Aristotle to Keynes (Princeton University Press, May 2022), which offers a genealogy of constitutive debates about money as a political institution.
Christine Parlour is the Sylvan C. Coleman Chair of Finance and Accounting at Berkeley Haas. Most of her work is in institutionally complex areas, such as market microstructure and banking. Her current work focuses on changes in the payments system and the effects on bank balance sheets. She has written for major finance and economics journals. She has been on the Nasdaq Economic Advisory Board and is currently on the steering committee for the New Special Study of Securities Markets.
Barry Eichengreen (moderator) is George C. Pardee and Helen N. Pardee Chair and Distinguished Professor of Economics and Professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley, where he has taught since 1987. He is a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research (Cambridge, Massachusetts) and Research Fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research (London, England). In 1997-98 he was Senior Policy Advisor at the International Monetary Fund. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (class of 1997). His most recent books are In Defense of Public Debt, with Asmaa El-Ganainy, Rui Esteves and Kris Mitchener (Oxford University Press 2021) and The Populist Temptation: Economic Grievance and Political Reaction in the Modern Era (Oxford University Press, 2018).
A presentation of the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative
they have no idea what it is like
to lose home at the risk of
never finding home again
have your entire life
split between two lands and
become a bridge between two countries
–Rupi Kaur
Migrants face trauma before, during, and after migration. The degree of the trauma may vary depending on the type and journey undertaken to reach the final destination, but it is present. On March 31, the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative will present a talk with Ms. Tsui Yee, a leading immigration lawyer, Dr. Gunisha Kaur, anesthesiologist and human rights researcher, and Ms. Leah Spelman, Executive Director at the Partnerships for Trauma Recovery. The panel, moderated by Prof. Khatharya Um of Ethnic Studies, will assess the extent of this trauma and how it manifests itself in the lives of migrants as they navigate their new realities. The talk will spotlight the need to study, research, and alleviate trauma in a social, economic, political, and legal framework.
This event is presented by the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative (BIMI). Social Science Matrix will be co-sponsoring this event, along with UC Berkeley’s Institute for Research on Labor and Employment (IRLE), Center for Study of Law and Society (CSLS), Center for Race & Gender, Institute of Governmental Studies, Othering and Belonging Institute, Asian Pacific American Student Development, and the Center for Research on Social Change.
Tsui Yee: Tsui H. Yee is the founder of Law Offices of Tsui H. Yee P.C., and has been practicing immigration law since 1999. She represents clients in family- and employment-based petitions and applications; removal (deportation) defense; asylum; and other immigration matters. Ms. Yee graduated from the University of California at Los Angeles School of Law and received her Bachelor of Arts degree in Political Science from Tufts University. She is admitted to practice law in the State of New York; the Second Circuit Court of Appeals; and the U.S. District Courts for the Southern and Eastern Districts of New York. Since 2016, Tsui has been selected to New York Metro Super Lawyers in the field of immigration law. She is a member of the New York City Bar Association, the American Immigration Lawyers Association, the Federal Bar Association, the Asian American Bar Association of New York, and the New York Inn of Court.
Gunisha Kaur: Gunisha Kaur is an Assistant Professor of Anesthesiology, the Founding Director of the Human Rights Impact Lab, and Co-Medical Director of the Weill Cornell Center for Human Rights. Dr. Kaur has dedicated her career as a physician-scientist to advancing the health of forcibly displaced individuals such as refugees and asylum seekers. She has used her extensive background in neuroscience research as an analytical framework to pioneer the study of human rights through scientific methodology. Her research has been supported by several funders including the National Institutes of Health, the Foundation for Anesthesia Education and Research, and Cornell University. Dr. Kaur’s academic writing on forcibly displaced populations has been published by the highest impact medical journals including The New England Journal of Medicine and The Lancet. She has translated her medical and scientific expertise in mainstream outlets including Time, CNN, and NBC News. She earned her B.S. from Cornell University in 2006, graduated from Weill Cornell Medical College in 2010, and completed her Anesthesiology Residency training at Weill Cornell Medical College/New York Presbyterian Hospital in 2014. She earned a Master’s Degree in Medical Anthropology from Harvard University in 2015.
Leah Spelman: Leah Spelman serves as the Executive Director of Partnerships for Trauma Recovery (PTR), a Berkeley-based nonprofit providing mental health care and case management services to refugees, asylum seekers, and other international survivors of human rights abuses. Prior to joining PTR, Ms. Spelman was the Chief Operating Officer for Days for Girls International, a Seattle-based nonprofit focused on women’s health. Prior to Days for Girls, Ms. Spelman lived in Jordan, conducting research under a Fulbright Grant when Syrian refugees first began entering the country in large waves. Ms. Spelman has an MPH in Global Health from the University of Washington, with a focus on global mental health and culturally-aware approaches to trauma care. She holds a BA in International Affairs with a concentration in Middle East Studies from George Washington University, and speaks Arabic, Spanish, and French.
Khatharya Um (moderator): Professor Khatharya Um is Associate Professor of Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies in the Department of Ethnic Studies, and Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at the University of California, Berkeley. Professor Um has received numerous awards for her community leadership and service, including congressional recognitions from Congresswoman Barbara Lee and Congresswoman Anna Eshoo. She is the first Cambodian American woman to receive a Ph.D.
Part of the Social Science Matrix "California Spotlight" Series
Wildfires have grown dramatically over the last five years, both as a result of a century of fire suppression as well as contemporary climate change, which makes fires hotter and more destructive. In this panel, we’ll discuss the contemporary social and economic impacts of wildfires in California during another record-breaking fire season. How have fires changed during the last five years, and with what impacts on the economy? How might policy-makers and economists respond to the changing fire season?
Co-sponsored by the Center for Law, Energy & the Environment (CLEE). This panel discussion is presented as part of the Social Science Matrix California Spotlight series.
Steve Pyne is currently an urban farmer and emeritus professor at Arizona State University. He is best known for his work on the history of fire and humanity, most recently his book The Pyrocene: How We Created an Age of Fire, and What Happens Next. He has published 35 books, most of them dealing with fire, but others on Antarctica, the Grand Canyon, the Voyager mission, and with his oldest daughter, an inquiry into the Pleistocene. His fire histories include surveys of America, Australia, Canada, Europe (including Russia), and the Earth.
Dave Jones is the Director of the Climate Risk Initiative at UC Berkeley School of Law’s Center on Law, Energy and Environment (CLEE). He is also a Distinguished Fellow with the ClimateWorks Foundation. Jones is a candidate for the California State Senate. He was Senior Director for Environmental Risk at The Nature Conservancy from January 2019 – June 2021, and served as California’s Insurance Commissioner from 2011 through 2018 and regulated the largest insurance market in the United States. He founded and chaired the Sustainable Insurance Forum (SIF), an international network of insurance regulators developing climate risk regulatory best practices. Jones was the first US financial regulator to require disclosure of investments in fossil fuel assets due to concerns about climate change related transition risk, the first to call for divesting investments in thermal coal, and the first to conduct climate risk scenario analysis of insurers’ investment portfolios. Jones is a graduate of DePauw University and earned a J.D. from Harvard Law School and a Master’s in Public Policy (MPP) from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.
Luiz Oliveira is a Senior Associate Economist in the Economic Research Department of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, which he joined in 2018. His expertise focuses on applied economic policy, developed over his career as a member of several macroeconomic policy and analysis teams at the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank Group and the Federal Reserve System. Luiz’s research focus includes macroeconomic forecasting, inflation, and climate risks.
Bruce Riordan (moderator) is the Director of the Berkeley Climate Change Network, a collaborative of UC Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley Lab researchers working on top climate issues. Previously, Mr. Riordan was the Director of the Bay Area Climate Adaptation Network (BayCAN) and the Coordinator of the Climate Readiness Institute. He has been working on climate change solutions for the Bay Area and California for nearly 20 years.